PepsiCo Inc.’s India-born chief executive officer (CEO) Indra Nooyi has recently said in an interview that Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the elections has left her daughters, gay workers, employees and the non-whites in distressed as there was “serious concern” among them about their safety in the US with Donald Trump as president.

“Do you have a box of tissues here,” Nooyi, a staunch Clinton supporter, said in the New York Times ‘Dealbook’ conference in New York when asked how she felt on the morning of 9 November when Trump won the presidential election.

Indra Nooyi was clearly seen very crestfallen by the loss of Clinton and was much concerned about her employees.

“I had to answer a lot of questions from my daughters, from our employees. They were all in mourning. Our employees were all crying. The question that they are asking, especially those who are not white ‘Are we safe’, women are asking ‘Are we safe’, LGBT people are asking ‘Are we safe’,” she said at the conference on 10 November.

Nooyi said she had never thought she would have to answer such questions, stressing that people across America should be assured that they will continue to be safe in the country. “The first thing that we all have to do is to assure everybody in the US that they are safe, nothing has changed because of this election. What we heard was election talk and that we will all come together and unify the country,” she said.

She said she had fully supported Clinton during her campaign and now can’t do anything besides mourning her loss. “The process of democracy happened, we just have to let life go on. We have to come together and life has to go on,” she said.
Nooyi also stressed on the fact that at some point the nation will have to “pick up the big issues of technological unemployment, global trade, immigration—all of which needs reform and have a serious conversation about that”. “Who is going to call for that dialogue, who will participate in that dialogue and what are we going to do about the dialogue are all big questions. I don’t know how we can have it in short bursts of sound bites. It would be counterproductive to do it in sound bites,” she said.